Malaria parasite infection, which affects our red blood cells, can be fatal. Currently, there are about 200 million malaria infections in the world each year and more than 400,000 people, mostly children, die of malaria each year.

Now, studying blood samples from patients treated for malaria at a clinical field station in Brazil’s Amazon jungle, a team of Brazilian and American researchers has made a surprising discovery that could open the door to a new vaccine.

Digging deeper, Junqueira, Lieberman and collaborators have found a completely unexpected immune response to malaria parasites that infect immature blood cells called reticulocytes. The revelation could help to design a new vaccine that might be capable of preventing malaria.

Their findings, published today in Nature Medicine, uncover special cellular mechanisms and properties specific to “teenaged” reticulocytes and a strain of malaria called Plasmodium vivax that enable our T cells to recognize and destroy both the infected reticulocytes and the parasites inside them. …

Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, has long been underappreciated for its role in gene expression. Until recent years, RNA has been thought of merely as a messenger, shuttling DNA’s instructions to the genetic machinery that synthesizes proteins.

But new discoveries of RNA functions, modifications and its ability to transcribe sections of the genome that were previously considered “junk DNA” has led to the discovery of a huge number of new druggable targets.

These new insights into RNA’s complex purposes have largely been uncovered through ever-increasingly sensitive and affordable sequencing methods. As a result, RNA-based drugs now stand to greatly extend our ability to treat diseases beyond the scope of what’s possible with small molecules and biologics.

Lieberman, who has helped pioneer the RNA-based drug revolution herself, was the first scientist to show in an animal disease model that small, double-stranded RNAs could be used as drugs and leveraged to knock down genes in cells.

Immune cells called “killer cells” target bacteria invading the body’s cells, but how do they do this so effectively? Bacteria can quickly evolve resistance against antibiotics, yet it seems they have not so readily been able to evade killer cells. This has caused researchers to become interested in finding out the exact mechanism that killer cells use to destroy bacterial invaders.

Although one way that killer cells can trigger bacterial death is by inflicting oxidative damage, it has not yet been at all understood how killer cells destroy bacteria in environments without oxygen.

Now, for the first time, researchers have caught killer cells red-handed in the act of microbial murder …

Bacterial infections that don’t respond to antibiotics are of rising concern. And so is sepsis — the immune system’s last-ditch, failed attack on infection that ends up being lethal itself. Sepsis is the largest killer of newborns and children worldwide and, in the U.S. alone, kills a quarter of a million people each year. Like antibiotic-resistant infections, it has no good treatment.

Of the various ways for a cell to die — necrosis, autophagy, etc. — apoptosis is probably the most orderly and contained. Also called programmed cell death (or, colloquially, “cellular suicide”), apoptosis is an effective way for diseased or damaged cells to remove themselves from a population before they can cause problems such as tumor formation.

Conventional wisdom holds that apoptosis is exclusive to multicellular organisms. Lieberman disagrees. She thinks that microbial cells — such as those of bacteria and parasites — can die in apoptotic fashion as well. In a recent Nature Medicine paper, she and her team make the case for the existence of what they’ve dubbed “microptosis.” And they think it could be harnessed to treat parasitic and other infections. …